Vote for Trump If You Must!

​My wife and I live in Boulder, Colorado. The next town due south is called Superior. At least one thing justifies that name: It is the site of our nearest Costco. Result: We head there every month to stock up, mainly on stuff we need. Today as we drove home from our provisioning trip, we took a back road along the route of the Superior wildfire of several years ago, a year-end conflagration which burned down over 1,000 houses and other structures. We passed a modest unburned house. Its front lawn was adorned with smallish American flags, the kind kids would wave at holiday parades. Next to the driveway a TRUMP 2024 sign was proudly displayed. I thought about the people who lived there right next to our true-Blue community and in a solidly Democrat state with a married gay Jewish governor. Here’s what I might say to those folks...

First, I would encourage them to vote for the former President. Here’s what you could count on, I’d say. You’d get a convicted felon; a dishonest businessman; a person who disrespects women, gays, and others; a convicted rapist; a name-caller; and a bully. He’d use the experience of his first term in office to insist on bringing in not only cabinet secretaries but staffs valued for their loyalty to him over their relevant experience and competence for their jobs. He’d make friends with our country’s enemies and push away our centuries-long friends. He’d undo laws and procedures to slow down global warming while ensuring sweetheart deals for big polluters like the fossil-fuel companies.

Although he needs the electoral support of the left-behind portion of the white male population, once in office he’d do good things mainly for his fellow millionaires and billionaires. A large part of his supporters would lose the benefits they had enjoyed thanks to those awful Democrats and their social safety net. As for his supporters who are Christian nationalists, they may come to see that rather than being God’s instrument to turn America into the world’s Christian nation on a hill, as one of the least Christian people one can imagine, he would instead create of this country a secular casino-like playground for the dissolute rich from all over. In that regard at least, he’d be an internationalist.

These days, in late-July/early-August, he is suggesting at rallies that his supporters need cast ballots only one more time, on November 5th. After that, the hassle of elections, he implies, will be a thing of the past, and with it—although he doesn’t say this—American democracy as we have known it will be gone. It will be a beautiful thing, he insists. Perhaps most importantly, his election will save this country from a fate worse than death: presidential leadership by a woman. And not just a woman, I would add, but a multi-racial person of color! If elected, to be sure, he will happily join the ranks of the world’s current autocrats: Orban, Erdogan, Maduro, Kim Il-Un, Putin, and Xi. Who knows? At his Inauguration there may even be banners celebrating the likes of such Trumpian forefathers as Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler. Go team! For Donald Trump that past is prologue.
​
So, my fellow citizens, if this Trumpian utopia appeals to you, use your last vote for him this November 5th. If not, do the sane thing and vote for Kamala Harris.

Sunrise or Sunset for America? Time will tell.